Google's grip on DeepMind set to cost taxpayers tens of billions
One of the founding investors in DeepMind has warned that UK taxpayers will miss out on billions of pounds in revenue from a pioneering protein breakthrough because of the sale of the technology company to Google six years ago.
Humayun Sheikh, an early investor in the London-based artificial intelligence company now owned by Google-owner Alphabet, said the news this week that it had cracked the 50-year-old scientific puzzle of protein folding was a sign that it was now looking at more commercial opportunities.
"What they had set out to do was artificial general intelligence, and this is a completely different route."
He said Google's ownership of the company means UK taxpayers miss out on tens of billions of pounds in future economic gains.
Mr Sheikh, who is now chief executive of AI firm Fetch.ai, said research in areas such as these could potentially yield tens of billions of pounds in economic gains for Google, given the advances are "way ahead" of anything other technology companies are achieving.
"If DeepMind hadn't been sold to Google, I'm 99pc sure it would have been unable to raise the money because it was not commercially viable. That's when the Government needed to support it."
He said the UK could have reaped billions in economic benefits had a move been made by the Government.
A spokesman for DeepMind said: "Up until now the team has been focused on performance. What we can say is that we remain committed to delivering on our mission of bringing the benefits of AI to the world.
"We look forward to working with the scientific community to understand the utility of the predictions that our system generates, and exploring where it makes sense to work with others to deliver potential applications. There is huge potential, but we are still thinking through these questions."
According to Mr Sheikh, DeepMind would be "worth something like $20bn to $30bn at least" today.
It was bought by Google in 2014 for £400m, and then placed under the broader Alphabet umbrella.
Since then, the company has hit a number of landmark moments, including on Monday when it announced it had achieved a major scientific breakthrough, using its AI to predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes in a move which could "significantly accelerate" drug development for diseases such as cancer.
Mr Sheikh warned that the world was "heading in the direction" that the most important research organisations were owned by a few major tech companies. "The main risk is they can do what they like with the technology. And, if it doesn't get used in the right way, it's detrimental to every society."
Matt Clifford, chief executive and co-founder of UK talent investor Entrepreneur First, said there was "always a risk with any strategic technology" being in the hands of a few companies. With DeepMind, he said, "right now it's not an issue, but might it be in the future, yes possibly".
He said there were "clearly going to be other strategic technologies that the UK does develop, quantum computing springs to mind, and I think the question is, if we want that capability to be owned by a UK company, do we have the right environment for companies like that to thrive? The answer is probably no."
Mr Clifford said funding of such research by governments was "actually a public good, and potentially even a global public good".
